I recently hired for a junior-mid role. 210 CVs -> 1 hire. I didn't have any automatic tools, so I went over them by myself 😅
The tips here are golden. Every single one of the CVs and cover letters were boring and unoriginal. To get an interview, you have to stand out from the crowd some way.
Marcus's PR of adding himself to the team page is an absolutely amazing (and simple) idea to make someone laugh and get their attention.
What if the opportunity you're looking for isn't available? Would it be okay to reach out to your favorite company to try and make the case for them to create a role for you? And if so, who should that be directed to?
I'd be interested in what other people think, but I'd direct it to the CEO / CTO, whomever is most relevant, and/or the hiring manager if they have one. It's important to keep it simple – no one wants to read an essay of someone trying to convince you to hire them.
If you're a user of their product, raise bugs and offer lots of useful product feedback they can use. Particularly early on, good hires for startups can come from the early adopters. Above all, it's about proving you get the problem they're trying to solve.
What seems to be missing here is how many roles you were hiring for. If you had only 4 roles open the number hired was going to be 4 no matter the inbound number of applications. The company doesn't have control over the inbound number of applications either. Time of year, local layoffs, job title, qualification requirements, and other things drastically affect the number of applicants. If you had 1800 people apply the number would have been 0.2% and the article would appear that you're even more selective. We're also lacking the spread of applicants here. Did 900 people apply for all 4 roles or was the distribution such that 600 people applied for 1 role and 100 people each applied for the other 3 roles?
This is great. Will include it in our Monday newsletter as it’s quite helpful to our job seeking audience
Done! Thanks for the lovely write up James
https://www.aistartupjobs.com/p/ai-startup-jobs-august-20-2024
I recently hired for a junior-mid role. 210 CVs -> 1 hire. I didn't have any automatic tools, so I went over them by myself 😅
The tips here are golden. Every single one of the CVs and cover letters were boring and unoriginal. To get an interview, you have to stand out from the crowd some way.
Marcus's PR of adding himself to the team page is an absolutely amazing (and simple) idea to make someone laugh and get their attention.
Yes, though we do hope every candidate we get now won't do the exact same thing having read this!
Great insights to be in top 1% of applicants or as you say, the top 0.4%
What if the opportunity you're looking for isn't available? Would it be okay to reach out to your favorite company to try and make the case for them to create a role for you? And if so, who should that be directed to?
Speculative applications are always worth trying. We actually have a permanent speculative application role open on our website: https://posthog.com/careers/speculative-application
I'd be interested in what other people think, but I'd direct it to the CEO / CTO, whomever is most relevant, and/or the hiring manager if they have one. It's important to keep it simple – no one wants to read an essay of someone trying to convince you to hire them.
If you're a user of their product, raise bugs and offer lots of useful product feedback they can use. Particularly early on, good hires for startups can come from the early adopters. Above all, it's about proving you get the problem they're trying to solve.
Sometimes its enough to be active in Github issues. That is how we found our main developer for our project https://automatio.co.
This was SUPER helpful! Saw this a little too late for my Posthog application(RIP old cover letter), but I'll improve it and keep trying!
Loved your job description analysis. What tool did you use to make that!?
Also, thanks for the shout-out on the "how to say no" article from me and Sidwyn
We use Excalidrawer for all the graphics. Very handy and easy to use.
What seems to be missing here is how many roles you were hiring for. If you had only 4 roles open the number hired was going to be 4 no matter the inbound number of applications. The company doesn't have control over the inbound number of applications either. Time of year, local layoffs, job title, qualification requirements, and other things drastically affect the number of applicants. If you had 1800 people apply the number would have been 0.2% and the article would appear that you're even more selective. We're also lacking the spread of applicants here. Did 900 people apply for all 4 roles or was the distribution such that 600 people applied for 1 role and 100 people each applied for the other 3 roles?